We are delighted to announce the publication of Black Oedipus by Rita Segato, newly translated from Spanish by Ramsey McGlazer and published by 1968 Press as part of the Important Little Books in Psychoanalysis series. On 10 February, we celebrated the book’s launch with an evening symposium hosted by Freud Museum, bringing together the author, translator, and an extraordinary group of scholars, writers, and psychoanalysts for a rich and urgent conversation.
Blindness is a theme that pervades the story of Oedipus and the Oedipus complex itself. Anthropologist Rita Segato’s seminal intervention into the field of psychoanalytic studies of Oedipal relations shows up blind spots left open since Sigmund Freud’s times—in relation to race, gender, and class. Drawing on the Brazilian context, Segato writes an at-once personal and scholarly, critically incisive and accessibly inviting testimonial to the erasure of the figure of the Black nanny from the Oedipal triangle. The Black nanny was often abruptly foreclosed from the infant’s lifeworld by the severance of employment.
A chance meeting with a painting that significantly features in Segato’s analysis, and within the pages of this book, jogs an expansive chain of memories. It gives Black Oedipus its impetus as a powerful excavation of the force of colonial foreclosure. It evokes the Black women who would give so much to the care of children of wealthy families.
Presented with prefatory and explanatory materials from anticolonial scholars and commentators Maria Ribeiro and Pascale Molinier, and in a revised translation by Ramsey McGlazer, this is the definitive edition of a classic text in psychoanalysis and anthropology.
The evening of the symposium had two parts. In the first part, introduced and moderated by editors Raluca Soreanu and Lizaveta van Munsteren, we heard from author Rita Segato, translator and literary scholar Ramsey McGlazer, translator and psychoanalyst Kristina Valendinova, and the audio note from writer and literary critic Hortense J. Spillers. The second part was introduced and moderated by psychoanalyst Tania Rivera, and it brought together, preface author and social thinker Maria Ribeiro, and psychoanalysts Diana Caine and Kwame Yonatan.
Black Oedipus is part of the book series Important Little Books in Psychoanalysis (1968 Press), edited by Raluca Soreanu, Lizaveta van Munsteren & the FREEPSY collective. The Series brings to the public radical contributions to psychoanalysis that have not yet been translated into English.
The book is available both in paper format and e-book on the 1968 Press website.
